You’ve heard of spam, but do you really know what it is? Even more important is knowing how to avoid the perception that your email marketing campaign is spam. If you’d like to learn how to create emails which market your products without being thrown into a junk folder, read on.
Minimize traditional email marketing activities during the holidays. Customers are preoccupied with family and friends, and are less likely to be paying attention to business email. Your odds of ending up in the spam box are considerably higher, which could have longer term implications for your bottom line. The major exception to this would be a business directly related to the holiday activities. Otherwise, give yourself a break and enjoy some downtime yourself. Business will be back on track in a day or two.
Before using email marketing, create a test email and send it to a friend or family member. Your loved one can see how the email looks and give you feedback. This way, if any changes need to be made, you can do it before sending the emails out to customers.
Get your audience to help you expand. After you get a small list going, go a step further and find ways to get them to invite their friends on board. Include subscription links in your emails so that your readers can pass them off to friends. Your subscription list will automatically grow as more people who are interested in your business sign up.
Even though it should be obvious, it is important enough to state over and over: Never send unsolicited emails. You should have explicit permission from everyone you send marketing emails to. This is about more than trying not to upset them; a recipient who considers your email spam can cause trouble for you with your service provider.
Your email marketing campaign will be more effective if you make it easy for customers to unsubscribe. This may seem paradoxical, but people will tend to trust you more if you make them feel as if they are in control. Post the unsubscribe link in an obvious place so they can find it easily.
You should get in touch with your subscribers at certain intervals and confirm with them that they are still interested in receiving emails from you. Most companies do this every nine months so that they can be sure that they are not being seen as an annoyance. This will also guarantee that the people on your email list have genuine interest and are not just taking up space.
Your color scheme should be consistent and should reflect your brand. If your colors are all over the board, you will appear amateurish and your efforts may not achieve the results that you desire. You can look on sites like COLOURlovers if you need some good ideas to get you going.
To make your emails look as professional as possible, invest a little thought in their design. Use a consistent layout, color scheme, and logo with all of your messages. This gives your subscribers the impression that they are hearing from a trustworthy, authoritative source. They will pay more attention and give your content more credence this way.
Put real consideration into where you place links in your marketing newsletters. For example, you don’t want to send readers away from your email before you give them their call to action. You also don’t want to put your priority links at the end of an email where they may be overlooked.
Your email messages must be attention-grabbing in order to be successful. This step involves doing some experimental work. You should change any aspect of your approach that’s not working. Even if something works great, there are still other things you can learn that may work even better so be on the lookout at all times.
You might want to consider following up to your clients with some type of surprise bonus that you are providing them. Include a link on your email that tells them to click on it. The concluding postscript could inform them that they can get all the details on this by clicking on the provided link.
There are zombie email addresses, and people do sell them. This not only wastes your time, but it keeps your messages from getting to the right targeted customers. Make sure you know what you are getting into, and make sure you are sending messages to people that could actually do business with you.
Make certain that the ‘from’ field of your e-mails displays your name or your business in a manner that is easily recognizable. Many people determine whether they are going to read an e-mail based on the ‘from’ field. A lot of people are also wary of opening e-mails that are sent from places that they do not readily recognize due to the fact that e-mails can contain viruses.
You should always get permission from your customers before you add them to your email list. No one likes unwelcome messages taking up space in their inbox. Sending out spam will sink your business quickly. Make sure you do everything legally by sending out emails to people who want to receive them.
Be honest and upfront when your readers subscribe. Let them know how often to expect emails from you, and what type of information will be contained in them. It is important to be truthful here, you don’t want your customers to be annoyed if they end up with more emails from you than they expected.
Now that you know how to create a well-received email campaign which will bring your sales pitch to your target audience, go for it! Use all of the techniques you’ve read here and you’ll be well on your way to increasing profits and driving traffic to your site again and again.
